My work- The Unwritten Stories

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Both functional and non-functional ceramic pieces are created, using handbuilt porcelain as a pliable, 3 dimensional canvas to tell my stories. Inscising, sgrafitto, colored slips and sometimes text are used along with transparent and opaque vibrantly colored glazes to create a world that is based on reality but not nececessarily truth or accuracy. Consciously rejecting ideas of proper perspective, proportion and realism, I tell a partial story that is ambiguous and conducive to multiple interpretations. I like that the images and textures are part of the piece, not simply on top of it and that they can be felt with your fingers.

At present, I am fascinated by my own accumulation of experiences, thoughts, interactions, feelings and how this creates a view of self. I am as much concerned with the untrue as the true and believes they each hold equal weight to the one who is experiencing it, regardless of their actuality. I suppose this bit of Joan Didion's writing may sum it up best.

“…instead, I tell what some would call lies. “That’s simply not true,” the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event. “The party was not for you, the spider was not a black widow, it wasn’t that way at all.” Very likely they are right, for not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain convinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters. The cracked crab that I recall having for lunch the day my father came home from Detroit in 1945 must certainly be embroidery, worked into the days pattern to lend verisimilitude; I was ten years old and would not now remember the cracked crab. The days events did not turn on cracked crab. And it is precisely this ficticious cracked crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in love and family guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind; and maybe no one else felt the ground harden even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow…” Joan Didion from her essay “on keeping a notebook”

The "truth" of what happened simply doesn't matter because absolute truth does not exist, only perceptions...

Unglazed and semi-glazed porcelain

For my brother

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